1. How we pick products
A printer has to clear three bars before it appears on this site. It has to be a real model that is currently sold. It has to make sense for somebody who refuses a supply subscription, which in practice means bottle-fed inkjets and mono lasers. And we have to be able to find its supply’s rated page yield and a price for that supply from a named source, so we can publish a cost per page rather than an impression.
Within that set, recommendations are ordered by running cost first, reliability second, and hardware features third. Sticker price is a factor in the total-cost arithmetic and is never the headline, because in this category the cheapest machine on the shelf is routinely the most expensive one to own.
The starting list came from reading what independent publications actually recommend, then verifying every model individually against the manufacturer’s own product page. That is why the list is short. A roundup of forty printers is a roundup where nobody checked forty printers.
2. What “we do not test” means, exactly
We think that is worth stating loudly rather than burying, because the alternative is common. In the SERP this site competes in, one page puts “Tested” in its title with no evidence of testing anywhere in four thousand words. We cannot out-test the publications that genuinely run labs, so we are not going to pretend to.
What we do instead is documentary and arithmetical. Every recommendation is built from published specifications, published rated yields, and prices we read and dated. That work is reproducible: you can click every source and redo every division. A lab result cannot be checked from your sofa; ours can.
The phrases that will never appear here
Anything asserting that we have put a printer on a bench, run a lab of our own, handled a unit, timed a print, or taken a measurement ourselves. Not as marketing language, and not as a figure of speech. If you ever find a claim like that on this site, it is an error and we would like to know.
3. Where our numbers come from
- Rated page yields come from the manufacturer’s own specification for that supply, and we name the ISO standard the rating is made against — ISO/IEC 24712 for ink, 19752 and 19798 for toner.
- Supply prices come from a named retailer or the manufacturer’s own store, and we publish which one and the date we read it. Where a manufacturer would not show us a price, we say so rather than substituting a figure from elsewhere and calling it a list price.
- Cost per page is our own division: supply price by rated yield. It is computed in one place in the code so that no page can contain a hand-typed figure. The method, in full.
- Industry cost ranges — the “laser is roughly five to eight cents a page” kind of figure — are other publishers’, always attributed by name and linked, and never presented as measurements of ours.
- Claims about company conduct, particularly about ink lockouts and firmware, carry an inline citation to named reporting and a date. Where a claim is disputed, we write it as a dispute and give both positions.
What every published cost figure must show
The supply name, its rated page yield, the price we used, the date we read it, and a link to the source. A bare cost-per-page number with no inputs is a number you cannot check, and on this site that counts as a defect rather than a shortcut.
4. How commission affects recommendations
It does not, and here is the part that makes that checkable rather than just asserted: our recommendations frequently point at the cheaper machine. The single most repeated piece of advice on this site is that somebody printing under about twenty pages a month should buy a mono laser rather than an expensive tank printer. That advice costs us money every time we give it.
Concretely: we do not accept payment for placement, we do not rank by commission rate, we do not adjust an opinion after a link is added, and no manufacturer has any input into what appears here. Amazon is the retailer on essentially every link because it is where these products are, not because of a commercial arrangement specific to this site. The funding disclosure sets out the mechanics.
5. Corrections
Report an error to contact@tankandtoner.com. Useful things to tell us: a price that has moved materially, a model no longer sold, a rated yield we have read wrong, a manufacturer policy that has changed.
When we correct a factual claim, the page gets a dated note saying what changed. We do not silently edit numbers. A site whose entire argument is that it shows its working cannot quietly rewrite the working.
6. How often this is reviewed
- Quarterly: every recommended model checked as still sold, every supply price and rated yield re-read, and the “checked” dates updated. A roundup recommending discontinued printers is worse than no roundup.
- Quarterly: every manufacturer ink-policy statement in the Ink Freedom section re-verified. Those are the highest-risk claims on the site.
- Annually: the year refreshed in roundup titles.
- Immediately: any reported error, and any manufacturer policy change.
Every page carries a visible last-updated date, and that date is tied to a real content change. We do not bump dates to look fresh.
7. What we will never do
- Invent a price, a page yield, or a specification.
- Publish a review score, a star rating, or an aggregate rating — including in structured data, where it would be invisible to readers and still dishonest.
- Invent or paraphrase a customer review or testimonial.
- Claim or imply that we have tested a printer ourselves.
- Invent a credential, a qualification, or a length of experience for the author.
- Manufacture urgency. We have no live price data, so “prices are rising” and “this deal ends soon” are things we could not honestly say even if we wanted to.
- Fill a gap with a plausible-sounding guess. Where we do not know something, the page says we do not know it.